Thinking dignity: re-imagining democracy

Across Europe dignity has been used to find and develop transgender rights. But what is it about dignity that works for transgender rights? And what could this mean for new and emerging rights for transgender people? In the UK, non-binary people – transgender people who do not identify as men or women - cannot obtain legal gender recognition. In this paper I present empirical research findings related to non-binary legal recognition and analyse these issues through the lens of dignity. I discuss the opportunities of dignity to understanding and guiding rights claims to legal gender recognition for non-binary people. I contend that dignity is valuable in capturing the specific harm of legal non-recognition and offering an aspirational guide for future law reform.

Over 1.2 billion people will be displaced by 2050 due to environmental change, conflict and civil unrest (IEP, 2020). This threat is particularly existential in low-lying island nations, many of which face the gradual extinction not only of individualized communities, but of entire nations. Without conflict, persecution, or governance failure, however, those displaced by climate change cannot call themselves “refugees“. The global community faces a stark choice: either wait for these climate displaced persons to be subsumed by violence and social instability or change the definition of what it means to be a “refugee,“ thus creating for millions an off-ramp from the predictable chaos that would otherwise ensue. One might even conceptualize an entirely new legal framework to handle climate displacement. Focusing on island nations in the South Pacific, this paper paints the contours of such a framework built around the human dignity of climate-displaced populations and communities.

Dignity, Democracy and Development have been key demands in popular political protests around the world. The concept of dignity is a catch-all demand for multiple human rights‘ needs, including democracy and development, particularly in the global South. First, the paper surveys a multitude of scholarly works in social studies on the politics and instrumentalisation of dignity. Then, the paper presents the findings of a 2017 global survey on understandings of dignity laying down the foundation for a new index of dignity. The key argument in this study is that the concept of dignity is a valuable tool for policy-makers to make sense of communities‘ needs in terms of development, peace-building, and other measurement for well-being. Ultimately, this research lays the foundation for a companion interface to map understandings of the concept of dignity from all over the world in order to grasp their differences and similarities for a variety of people and in a global context.

This paper argues that women’s reproductive rights are connected to the quality of democracy. Key in establishing this connection is the concept of dignity which features prominently in judicial and political arguments on abortion. While this concept has been used on both sides of the dispute, it can provide us with a much wider – and arguably more helpful – framework for understanding what is at stake by denying women’s abortion rights. The paper explores these issues in two complementary manners: (i) by identifying some key connections between dignity, democracy and women’s rights which on democracy as a process of democratisation and ideal (ii) by examining the various role that dignity could play in an inclusive democratic system.

If dignity is the right to have rights, then what is the basis for according rights to non-humans? There has been a long tradition in common law of recognizing the rights of non-humans including animals and, increasingly, of other natural elements including rivers (Colombia, New Zealand) and ecosystems (India, Colombia). On the other hand, non-human but human-created elements, from corporate entities to robots, are also being accorded constitutional and other types of rights. This presentation explores whether our anthropocentric notions of dignity justify the recognition of rights of non-humans or if the common understanding of dignity—as immanent in the human person – needs to be adjusted to conform with the recognition of the rights of others. Ultimately, this presentation will ask whether and if so on what basis non-humans are entitled to admission in the political community.

Recognizing human dignity under law has helped to protect abortion rights from governmental overreach in the United States for nearly half a century. In 1973 the United States Supreme Court by a 7-2 margin decided the right to abortion is completely protected within the 1st trimester, subject to government health-based regulation within the 2nd, and subject to complete prohibition in the 3rd. It then refined this test to prohibit the government from imposing an "undue burden" on abortion rights, based in part on recognizing a woman's right to dignity. Yet in June 2022 the same Court reversed itself in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, holding that the U.S. Constitution does not recognize abortion rights and thus overruling prior precedent. Each state now decides for itself whether and the extent to which to permit abortions, moving the debate from the courts to the polling booth. This presentation will summarize the Dobbs case and what it means for dignity and democracy.